There came a sound from the couch, from the almost unbearable figure. And a moment later Crispin realized he was hearing laughter. The sound made him think of something slithering over broken glass.
"Come. Sister," said Lecanus Daleinus, once heir to an extravagantly patrician lineage and an inconceivable fortune. "No… time! Undress! Let me… touch! Hurry!"
Crispin closed his eyes again.
'Good, good!" came a third voice, shockingly. In his head. 'She hates that. Doesn't know what to believe. There's someone here with her. Red hair. No idea who. You're making him feel ill. You are so hideous! The whore's looking at him now.
Crispin felt the world rock and sway like a ship hit hard by a wave. He pressed his hands hard against the wall behind him. Looked around wildly.
Saw the bird, almost immediately, on the window ledge.
I don't know why she's here today! How can I answer that? Keep calm. She may only be anxious. She may-
Alixana laughed aloud. Again the illusion was frightening. It was another woman's laughter, not her own. Crispin remembered Styliane in her own bedchamber, the low, sardonic sound of her amusement, identical to this. "You are disgusting, by choice," the Empress said. "A comic version of yourself, like some cheap pantomime figure. Have you nothing better to offer or ask than a grope in your darkness?"
"What else could I… possibly… offer you, dear sister? Wife of the Supreme Strategos. Did he please… you last night? In your dark? Did someone else? Oh, tell me! Tell!" The voice, through the whistling sound, was laboured, broken, as if the sounds were crawling up from some labyrinthine half-blocked tunnel leading down to things below the earth.
'Good!" Crispin heard again, in the silence of the half-world. "I think I'm right. She's just checking on you. The war coming. This is an accident. She's only worried. You'd be pleased-she looks wretched, used by slaves. Old!
Fighting nausea, Crispin stayed where he was, his breathing carefully shallow, though there was no actual secret to his presence now. His mind was in a desperate whirl. Out of the chaos, a question spun free and he reached for it: how did this man and his creature know, here, about the war?
There was something ugly at work here. This bird was like none he had yet known or heard. The inner voice wasn't that of Zoticus's creations. This bird soul spoke in a woman's voice, bitter and hard, from beyond Bassania: Ispahani or Ajbar or lands whose names he did not know. It was dark in hue, small as Linon, but not like Linon at all.
He remembered that the Daleinoi had made their fortune with a monopoly on the spice trade to the east. He looked at the man on the couch, burned so terribly, turned into this horror, and again the thought came to him: how is he alive?
And again the same answer came and he was afraid.
'I know," said the bird abruptly, replying to something. 'I know! I know! I know!" And what Crispin heard now in the low, harsh voice was exultation, fierce as a blaze.
"I take no delight," the Empress said, all ice and edge like Styliane, "in any of this, and see no reason to attend to your pleasures. I prefer my own, brother. I'm here to ask if there's anything you need… immediately." She left an emphasis on the last word. "You might recall, dear brother, that they leave us alone for only a little while."
"Of course I… recall. That is why you are cruel… to be dressed… still. Little sister, come closer… and tell me. Tell me… how did he… take you, last night?"
Stomach churning, Crispin saw the ruined man's hand, gnarled like a claw, reach under his own tunic to his groin. And he heard the inward laughter of the eastern bird.
Think of your father," said Alixana. "And of your ancestors. If this is all you are now, brother, I shall not return. Consider it, Lecanus. I warned you last time. I'm going to take a walk now and a meal in sunlight on the island. I will come back before I sail. When I do, if this is what you are, still, I will have no more time for this journey and will not return."
"Oh! Oh!" wheezed the man on the couch. "I am desolate! I have… shamed my dear sister. Our innocent… fair child."
Crispin saw Alixana bite her lip, staring at the figure before her as if her gaze could probe his depths. She couldn't know, Crispin thought. She couldn't know why her immaculate, brilliant deception was being so effortlessly defeated. But she sensed it was being foiled, somehow, that Lecanus was playing with her, and perhaps that was why she feared this room so much. And why she still came.
She said nothing more, walked from the room and the house, head high, shoulders straight, as before. An actress, an Empress, proud as some goddess of the ancient pantheon, betraying nothing, unless you looked very, very closely.
Crispin followed, the laughter of the bird drilling in his head. Just as he came into the sunshine, closing his eyes, temporarily blind, he heard, 'I want to be there! Lecanus, I want us to be there!
He didn't hear the reply, of course.
"Styliane never pleasured him, in the event you were wondering. She's corrupt in her own ways, but she never did that."
Crispin was wondering how much was known about a certain recent night, and then decided not to think about it. They were on the southern side of the island, facing Deapolis across the water. Her Excubitors had accompanied them through the trees, past a second clearing with another set of huts and houses. These were empty. There had been other prisoners here once, evidently. Not now. Lecanus Daleinus had the isle to himself, with his handful of guards.
It was past midday now, by the sun. They would be racing again in the Hippodrome soon, if they hadn't started already, the day turning steadily towards an announcement of war. Crispin understood that the Empress was simply allowing an interval to pass before she went back to that house in the clearing to see if anything had changed.
It wouldn't have, he knew. What he didn't know was whether to say anything about it. There were so many betrayals embedded here: of Zoticus, of Shirin and her bird, and of his own privacy, his gift, his secret. Linon. At the same time, those last silent words of the eastern creature were still with him, with the undeniable signal of danger in them.
He had little appetite when they sat down to their meal, picked in a desultory fashion at the fish-cakes and the olives. Drank his wine. Had asked for it to be well watered. The Empress was largely silent, had been from the time they'd left the clearing. She had walked off by herself, in fact, when they'd first reached this strand, becoming a small, purple-cloaked dot in the distance along the stony beachfront here, two of her soldiers following at a distance. Crispin had sat down on a grassy place between trees and stones, watching the changing light on the sea. Green, blue, blue-green, grey.
Eventually she had come back, gestured for him not to rise, and had taken her place, gracefully, on a square of silk unfolded for her. The food had been spread on another cloth in this quiet place that ought to have been soothing in its beauty, a benign embodiment of the quickening spring.
Crispin said, after a time, "You watched them together, I gather. Styliane and… her brother."
The Empress wasn't eating either. She nodded. "Of course. I had to. How else would I have learned how and what to say, playing her?" She looked at him.